How to Make Iced Tea with Loose Leaf Tea
Loose leaf makes better iced tea than bags. That’s not a close call. The leaves have room to open, the extraction is cleaner, and you’re not fighting the papery, compressed character of a teabag th...
What Was the Tea Horse Road? History of China's Ancient Chamadao
The Tea Horse Road: How Tea Conquered the Roof of the World There's a cobblestone path in western Sichuan, buried now under bamboo and moss, that once carried more commercial weight than any road...
Tea as Diplomacy: How the Leaf Shaped Chinese International Relations
Standing in the central hall of Beijing's National Museum years ago, I found myself transfixed by a peculiar artifact: a 16th-century silver tea caddy adorned with both Chinese dragons and Portugue...
The Language of Tea: Understanding Chinese Tea Terminology
The language of Chinese tea unfolds like the leaves themselves—gradually, revealing complexity with each steeping. For the Western enthusiast stepping into this ancient tradition, learning this lan...
The Six Types of Chinese Tea: A Complete Guide
All tea—every type, every style, every country of origin—comes from one plant: Camellia sinensis. What makes green tea green, black tea black, and oolong something in between isn’t the plant or whe...
Chinese Lettuce Wraps With Chicken Prep Time: Not Too LongCook Time: Rather Short Ingredients 1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breast, diced very finely, slightly larger than minced 1 finely dic...
Tea Punch - History and Recipes
Back in the 1700s, sailors who would spend months at sea needed a drink to liven things up. Grog, the watered-down rum ration, could only do so much. So the idea of tea punch was born. Sailors ...
Tea Preparation Through The Dynasties
Entirely unrecognizable as the beverage we think of as “tea”, descriptions of early tea preparations include one in which “The (tea) leaves were steamed, crushed in a mortar, made into a cake, and ...
Oft attributed to Abraham Lincoln, though probably an old joke even in the 1850s. Here, it's used as a comment on culinary acumen at sea, in a 1902 publication of Punch. "If this is coffee, I w...
The first tea from China to arrive in Moscow was a present of 65 kilograms to Tsar Michael I from a Mongolian khan during the first half of the 17th Century. Over the next hundred years, tea remain...
A gaiwan is the simple bowl, lid and saucer that is often used to brew loose-leaf tea. The name says it all: gaiwan translates literally into "lid-bowl." Many tea historians believe that the gaiwa...
The Road to Tea Time begins 3,500 years ago, in the extremely rugged mountains of southern China, not terribly far from either Burma or India. It is there that a plant is identified and first culti...